Nowadays over one billion cars are circulating on our roads worldwide. This number is expected to double within the next 20 years. In the same time, over two billion will move to cities. This is the equivalent of building from scratch a city of the size of Rome or Berlin every month, for twenty years straight.

This poses many challenges to our society: city administrations need to reduce traffic congestion and offer a solution which is, at the same time, economically viable and able to foster a car-independent lifestyle. Citizens need to be able to move within the city in a convenient way, without bothering to own and operate a car. National governments have to reduce pollution to meet the always increasing air quality standards, without sacrificing economic growth.

MVMANT is a complete platform that enables urban transportation on demand. The dispatching of vehicles is managed by predictive algorithms and by requests generated through the dedicated app. This allows to dislocate the vehicles when and were needed and match the mobility needs of the citizens in the most efficient way. The immediate consequence is that a higher seat occupancy ratio can be reached, offsetting a high number of private vehicles, thus reducing the average pollution per capita and increasing significantly the revenues for the public transportation operator.

MVMANT also includes a city loyalty system, that allows local businesses to advertise inside the app and on the veichles, with demographic and geotargeted advertising and incentivize the usage of MVMANT by awarding loyalty points (MVMiles) that can be redeemed for free rides.

MVMANT was developed by the Sicilian software company Edisonweb and succesfully tested in the city of Ragusa: 2.200 subscribers in three weeks, over 13.000 km driven and tons of saved emissions.

MVMANT is powered by several FIWARE Generic Enablers that made a rapid development possible.The test results were so succesful and promising, that MVMANT has been spun-off in an autonomous entity based in Germany, in order to further develop the business and cooperations with local governments and car manufacturers.

Cities are almost as old as society itself, their birth being surrounded by mysteries and legends such as the one of Romulus and Remus and the foundation of Rome. Since then, since the times of Roman urbanism, our urban environments have changed a lot. Not only in terms of distribution or legislation, but, especially, in terms of city management. And now, the new trend in city management is the creation of smart environments. We have already spoken about the smartness of devices, but now we can speak about cities that can manage their own information for the benefit of citizens.

And, for FIWARE, these urban environments, which are generally called Smart Cities, have been essential, as some of our enablers are meant to deal with the traffic of information that only places such as cities can generate. Apart from that, the Open & Agile Smart Cities Initiative is now modeling a standardized procedure to cope with data, so that the solutions created for one city can be adapted for others.

Some of the most interesting projects that have been founded and funded thanks to the FIWARE Accelerator Programme are actually destined to develop solutions in this field. That is why it is now the time to give them the floor and listen to the voices of those really working to improve the places we live in. Because their voices are our own.

The team of AEInnova was expecting to spend the 13th of November 2015 like the previous days, facing the challenges that any entrepreneurial initiative brings, especially in the R&D field. However, everything changed when they got to know that AEInnova was one of the 15 European Energy Startups to be invited to the Generate 15 Semifinals in Groningen on the 22nd and 23rd of November. The Generate 15 was the first Startup Event promoted by the Energy Academy Europe and it was built as an acceleration program to support Energy Startups from all over Europe to build scalable and innovative businesses, faster than they would be able to do on their own.

All the finalists then had to prepare for the Finals on 22nd and 23rd of November with a two-day customized programme. Together with a team of experienced business coaches, the top-facilitator and expert coach Neil Sheridan provided an intensive programme to sharpen the skills of the Energy Startups. As a representative of AEInnova, Gerard Altayó, AEInnova’s Business Developer, attended the two days event. After that, all Startups were ready to give their best and pitch their business ideas. Raul Aragonés, AEInnova’s CEO, did not want to miss the opportunity and joined Gerard in the semifinal pitch. Both presented their idea to a reputed group of business experts and, at the end, AEInnova was selected as one of the Final Five Energy Startups who had the chance to pitch in the Finals of Generate 15 on the 24th of November.

On the 24th, the Finals took place at the Energy Convention and five innovative Energy Startups had the opportunity to pitch in front of a high-profile jury of investors, scientists and established entrepreneurs; the winner receiving €15,000. Unfortunately, the prize stayed in the Netherlands but AEInnova’s opportunities brought to Barcelona a huge learning experience, some interesting contacts and the conviction that AEInnova’s business idea has an enormous potential. That is just the beginning. This is their story…

FIWARE will attend Smart City Expo World Congress (Barcelona), the world´s leading smart city event, where the most innovative and influential smart city thinkers will attend, including global, national and regional representatives, academic institutions, research centers, incubators, investors and top corporations. As an open standard platform for Smart Cities, FIWARE is now providing the basis for an open and sustainable ecosystem where developers, startups and companies can develop their ideas once for multiple cities, thus enabling the transformation of cities into engines of economic growth and welfare. The work of FIWARE has led to the creation of a Digital Single Market for Smart Cities.

So far, more than sixty cities have joined the Open & Agile Smart Cities Initiative, thus adopting common standards to manage context information and make it available as open data. These standards are integrated in the FIWARE platform, laying the foundations of public-private partnerships where cities and platform providers can jointly develop and deploy interoperable Smart digital Services infrastructures. If you want to learn everything that you need to know about the role of technology in cities, about the collaboration to create a standard model of Smart City services or the governmental approach to that model, come and listen to the words of Jesús Villasante, Jarmo Eskelinen or Juanjo Hierro.

There are 5 conferences scheduled, including words from the speakers just mentioned. This agenda will address (1) innovative platforms for multi-stakeholder processes to foster sustainable cities (17/11), (2) raising resources and creating platforms to develop more equitable cities (18/11) (3)technological challenges for urban development & (4)city standards and indicators spreading smart cities (19/11).

Make sure you don´t miss the opportunity to learn what FIWARE brings to smart cities at the FIWARE stand that has been designed to show all of the benefits of becoming part of the ecosystem. The FIWARE stand will offer demos on SME´s, introducing some of the start-ups including Hostabee, TalkyCar and Batsharing, as well as an extra demo on MAPGETS which is an application platform, based on FIWARE.

“Yesterday was a big day for us”, reads on the 18th of September the blog of Connecterra, one of the startups that have been selected for the FIWARE Accelerator Programme by Smart AgriFood. “At our first ever startup pitch event”, it continues, “Connecterra walked away with top honors with the maximum reward on offer […] Organized by Smart AgriFood, an EU sponsored AgTech accelerator, we beat 48 AgTech startups across Europe to be placed in the top 3 that share top rewards. This is a significant endorsement of our technology, approach and team for which we are proud and grateful to the organizers.”

Less than a month later, the team of Connecterra would win the Alpha Pitch at Web Summit. In its blog, the team of Web Summit shows a brief interview that they made to the winners, proving how humble they are when speaking about their work. “They like to say that they’re the ‘Fitbit for cows’.”, says this blog, “This Amsterdam-based startup’s product can analyse real-time movement data of cattle to help improve farm productivy.” According to this interview, one of the main disadvantages that the team considered that they had, in comparison with other startups, is the fact that their product is not consumer-facing and that not anyone without knowledge about the dairy industry could understand properly what it is.

Connecterra has developed a sensor that measures the activity of a cow in 3D space and by leveraging its deep learning algorithms can detect various behaviors such as walking, eating, ruminating etc. This information is then modeled to provide farmers with health insights which help them reduce labor input and improve animal health resulting in higher productivity from each cow. In addition to providing farmers with insights, their platform also enables veterinarians to observe herd data and provide suggestions to farmers on improving farm practices. This helps democratize farmer knowledge to those that need it most and especially in developing countries.

Connecterra believes the dairy service will help farmers increase productivity per animal by up to 20 % or more. This is the first such service available to dairy farmers which focuses on generating meaning from data and providing farmers with specific, actionable insights versus ‘more data’.

“I think that Connecterra”, said the founder of the startup for the blog of Web Summit, “will have big impact on real-world problems that can be solved with technology but came with an open mind to the pitch.” According to him, thanks to PITCH, they are raising a first round of $2.1 million now. This will help them talk to investors; it gets them global attention.

We hope to keep hearing great news from them, as it’s their stories which build our own.

This week, our most exciting news is the launch of the new FIWARE webpage, which was set in motion some days ago. It´s something we´ve all been waiting for and it gives you the chance to uncover the history and the journey of FIWARE “as a story of stories which tells the accounts of hundreds of peoples reality”. However, the story of FIWARE is only possible with the contribution of other stories; your stories. We want to hear the entirety of your story, from when you had your moment of inspiration to what gave you the motivation to advance with the innovation and how you came to get involved with FIWARE. Without your stories, we can´t tell you ours.

The accelerator programme is another imperative part of process with FIWARE as it has, and continues to help new projects of various startup´s, by offering them not only funding but once in a lifetime opportunities. It has not only substantially helped and offered support to the most innovative business projects using FIWARE but it has contributed to founding their stories. In one of the videos launched on our new webpage, you can find out more about one of our accelerators, Smart AgriFood. It has selected various ICT based SME´s to develop applications by taking advantage of FIWARE technologies “to make agriculture more high-tech, and it is giving these start-ups the opportunity to develop and bring their services into the market.

Food production can be tricky as it requires natural resources and given a growing population, we need more resources. It is a common view that ICT is a necessary piece of the puzzle to accommodate the need for more resources. This is where Smart AgriFood comes in. It aims to offer to the end users, in this case farmers, an open ecosystem based on FIWARE to help to find a solution to the problems in Agriculture.

All that ´smart´ means in this sense, is controlling and improving production in farming and agriculture with the use of technology. This is where “you act, you get feedback from your action and you re-act on this feedback”, adjusting to the situation permanently. According to the Smart AgriFood coordinator “using experiences, data and information” from elsewhere is an important step in the path to creating and achieving an open ecosystem in the agriculture sector.

Never will the story of FIWARE be properly understood, if not as a story of stories which tells the accounts of hundreds of people’s reality. And from now on, the floor must be, as it has always been, theirs. Our startups, our accelerators, our contributors, our technical architects, our representatives, and all of the people that are somehow involved in the FIWARE ecosystem are the ones that must now raise their voices. Let’s listen to their personal stories to build our own voice. ‘Cause that is going to be our story. Now, which is yours?

The stories of CreatiFI

Some weeks ago, one of the sixteen FIWARE accelerators gathered some of the projects that it had already selected for a pitching session where some of the startups to access the second round of acceleration would be selected. This 4-day event with CreatiFI gathered these top teams’ projects to exhibit more than just an online platform but a collaboration of inspiration, incentive and encouragement from a range of teams. It was a phenomenal opportunity “to be together, to share experiences with each other, to have the teams talking to each other and see how they can help each other”, as Ingrid Willems, from the CreatiFI accelerator, explains in the videos that have just been shared as part of our efforts to share with you all the talent that we have found in our path. The goal of events such as CreatiFI’s is to give the innovators an opportunity to “go home with something extra”, she continues, “so that they have the feeling, yes, I have something that will help my business move forward.”

More stories to come

CreatiFI is not the only FIWARE accelerator that has shared with us the talent that they are finding (and funding). Others, such as Smart AgriFood, have also found great projects and are working hand in hand with them. Do you want to discover them all? Why don’t you visit our brand new microsite and find them all? And don’t forget to share them through your social networks, ‘cause the wider the audience our stories reach, the higher their echoes will sound!

The 6 FIWARE accelerators appointed as geography leaders in Spain, led by IMPACT for this first Spain Geography Meetup, have invited to participate all Spanish startup beneficiaries (more than 140 teams)

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